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Utopia-where there is no gender

By Wajid Syed

Every day more and more people surf the web or log onto cyberspace. Commercials bombard them with web page addresses and encourage getting on-line; there is a commercial proclaiming that cyberspace is a utopia where there is no gender, no age, no race, and no infirmities. People get on-line from many places: work, school, and home. Some spend much of their free time surfing the web, writing e-mails, or using chat rooms. But still at these virtual places most of these people pose themselves different from their actual sex.

Needless to say that the beauty, and sometimes misfortune, of the Internet is that it offers the opportunity for people to experiment with their identity. One way to do that is to switch one’s gender to see how the other-half lives. In a text-only chat room the first step is simply to change one’s online name.

After selecting a new name and appearance comes the even more challenging task of trying to play the role of the opposite sex person one has chosen. It’s not an easy thing to do.

“This gender swapping is probably much more commonplace than we realize,” observe some renowned psychologists in the country. Dr Saadia Zakia, a renowned psychologist working at a local hospital, who interviewed four people as a case study.

“Everyone familiar with cyberspace life has heard-of or even experienced it,” she said adding, “Personally, I have seen and heard of many more males switching gender than females.”

If this accurately reflects the population of cybercitizens as a whole, an interesting question surfaces.

Why are males so interested in experimenting with a woman’s identity? The answers go far beyond cyberspace and point to larger social and psychological issues.

The psychologists outline few possibilities: (a) Due to stereotype cultural and religious pressure, it may be difficult for some men to explore within themselves what society labels as ‘feminine’ characteristics. These males may rely on the anonymity of cyberspace to express their ‘feminine’ side, which they feel they must otherwise hide. (b) Adopting a feminine role in cyberspace may be a way to draw more attention to them! Getting noticed and responded to in cyberspace is not always easy, especially in such distracting, noisy environments as the visual chat habitats. Taking a female name, especially a sexy one, will almost instantly draw reactions. The gender-switched male may even like the feeling of power and control over other males that goes along with this switch. (c) Some males may adopt a feminine identity to investigate male-female relationships. They may be testing out various ways of interacting with males in order to learn, first hand, what it’s like being on the woman’s side. Hopefully, they use that knowledge to enhance their relationships with females. (d) Disguised as a female, a male looking for intimacy, romance and cybersex from another male may be acting upon conscious or unconscious homosexual feelings. (e) In rare cases, gender-switching could be a sign of what would be diagnosed as ‘gender-confusion’, ie, a psychological disturbance where one’s identity as a male or female has not fully developed.

]Lets face this reality that at virtual places, the majority of users of internet are still male, regardless of their country, psychology, environment and any other justification you have.

And in such an ambiguous environment as the internet, the ability to lose one’s inhibitions is quite strong. With a number of male computer users out there, and no counterpart women on the net, I think some men pretend to be women - not because they have any desire to have sexual experiences with men themselves, but because they wish to perpetuate some form of cyber experience.

It is as if they are actors, manipulating the puppet of a women (just as they might in their own mind, during a sexual fantasy) but here, they are sustaining the puppet for some other stranger at the end of another modem to play with.

Once this cyberstory then exists, it doesn’t really matter who wrote the woman’s lines or who wrote the man’s. For both can enjoy it, from whatever perspective that they choose.

“Wanting, and trying, to switch gender is by no means a new social phenomenon,” maintains Dr Saadia Zakia. Theories in psychology abound on this topic. But the online version of gender-switching is unique and important for several reasons.

“First of all, cyberspace makes it so easy. It provides an attractive opportunity to experiment, abandon the experiment if necessary, and safely try again, if one so desires. More and different types of people are going to try it than in ‘real life.’ It also provides researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to study how and why people gender switch,” she believed.

The study held by psychologists reveal that more of such cyberzines are mentally disturbed. “This mental disorder is exposed when they try to swap their gender, but to know exactly what their problem is and how can it be rectified they need a proper check-up,” Dr Saadia added.

She said, two personalities of her case study were under 18 and swapped their gender on the Internet to explore the female community. “They usually don’t have good relations with females. She added that both of the youngsters were weak in their studies and take interests in cigarettes and films.

The other two were 30 plus and married. Dr Saadia said the other two males were settled, but blamed their in-house tensions as the main reason to chat on the Internet. But since they don’t get response from other males similarly chatting on the net, they swapped their gender and try to take sympathies.

The remaining two, part of the case study, were in mid thirties and informed that they swapped their gender on the net to fool others. “They say that they enjoy playing such dramas,” she said, adding “but they have mental problems.”

Such trends are taking roots in our society too. Most of the youngster in our society use Internet only for chatting purposes to combat their frustration and like to talk to females only, for which they swap their gender, maintained Dr Saadia.

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